Posts Tagged ‘Nine Nations of North American’

Joel Garreau, a reporter for the Washington Post, wrote back in 1981 that the USA and Canada were not actually nations, only a collection of regional cultures.

He claimed that their territories were actually divided among The Nine Nations of North America (shown in the left map above), of which only Quebec was wholly contained within the jurisdiction of Canada and Dixie within the United States.

His conclusions were based on travels and interviews in the late 1970s, and he concluded that there really were six Canadian nations, all but one of which had a metropolis in the United States. They were:

New England (Boston), the U.S. New England states and the Canadian maritime provinces.

Quebec (Montreal), the actual province of Quebec.

The Foundry (Detroit), the industrial region north and south of the Great Lakes and including the U.S. Middle Atlantic States.

The Breadbasket (Kansas City), the agricultural U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian prairie provinces.

The Empty Quarter (Denver), the thinly populated, mineral-rich Rocky Mountain states and provinces and the Canadian north.

Ecotopia (San Francisco), the Pacific-facing region from San Francisco to Juneau, Alaska.

Americans and Canadians within these areas, Garreau argued, had more in common with each other, economically and culturally, than they did with U.S. and Canadian citizens in other regions.

He divided Canada into six “nations”, at least four of which overlap with the United States. They are:

First Nation, the newly autonomous American Indian nations in the Canadian North.

New France, the heirs of the original French settlers.

Yankeedom, roughly corresponding on the Canadian side to Garreau’s New England.

Midlands, which I will discuss below.

The Far West, roughly corresponding to Garreau’s Empty Quarter

The Left Coast, roughly corresponding to Garreau’s Ecotopia.

Woodard, who lives in Maine, described the sense of unity between New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces. The Canadian Maritimes were settled from New England, he wrote, and Yankees and Maritimers were reluctant to fight each other during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.

The provinces of Upper Canada (now Ontario) and New Brunswick were created after the Revolutionary War to provide a refuge for defeated Loyalists after the American Revolution. Most of those Loyalists, according to Woodard, were pro-British fighters, neutral merchants and farmers and Quaker pacifists from the New York City and Philadelphia regions.

Some of them were loyal to the British crown. Others were attracted by the offer of free land in Ontario—a forerunner of the U.S. Homestead Act.

British, Scots and Irish settlers came in larger numbers to the Maritimes and Ontario, but, according to Woodard, the settlers from the U.S. Midlands came first and it was they who set the tone for the culture. That is why his hypothetical Midlands region has such a strange, looping shape.